This varied, well-chosen selection brings onto one CD set the best of Dylan Thomas. Here is the legendary recording of Under Milk Wood, with Richard Burton and Richard Bebb as narrators; but here also are two radio productions he wrote before that great classic, and though interesting in their own right, they show how Under Milk Wood grew gradually in his imagination. Thomas was a charismatic, idiosyncratic performer of his own poetry and stories, and here is a representative selection. Performances of Dylan Thomas have since moved on and the greatness of the writer as a poet and storyteller are perhaps best heard in new recordings by actors of our own time. Here Bebb, Madoc and Hughes share some of Thomas’s finest, most challenging and endearing works.

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Published Reviews

Audiobooks Today01-Sep-2010

As one of the first great poet performers ever recorded, Dylan Thomas utilized language as a powerful and sometimes whimsical tool. In THE ESSENTIAL DYLAN THOMAS hear him perform—along with Richard Burton, Philip Madoc and others—not just poems by Thomas, but also stories. A must for poetry fans, the production is superb, displaying a smorgasbord of color and taste befitting the discriminating audio palate.

The voice of Dylan Thomas, on paper or on
a recording, is unmistakable. His rich play of
language and images informed all his work
and it was reflected in his distinctive manner
of performance which, like his life, was
large and vivid. All this rightly made him a
personality as well as a poet – certainly, he
left an unforgettable impression on all those
he met. It was one reason why, in the latter
part of his career, he was so popular on the
American lecture and poetry circuit.

He was, perhaps, the first outstanding
poet-performer of the recording era. Many
of his recordings remain, from those he
made for the BBC and also for the farsighted
Caedmon label in the US. We owe a
debt to the enterprise of both for marking
Thomas’s unique talent and putting him in
the studio, even though doing this was
often a fraught, knife-edge business. He
nearly forgot to arrive at the BBC studios on
his first engagement – when radio was live!
– and his first Caedmon recording was a
similarly improvisatory experience. The two
Caedmon founders, Barbara Cohen and
Marianne Roney (just 22 years old), had
pursued him with telephone calls and
eventually persuaded him, with a $500
advance and 10 per cent royalty deal
thereafter, to fix a date to record. He failed
to show on the scheduled day, but did
make the next date (22 February 1952) at
the Steinway Hall in New York. The
recording engineer was Peter Bartók, son of
the composer Béla Bartók. Thomas recorded
poems and, when he realised there was
space left on the LPs, added Memories of
Christmas.

This, of course, is a marvel for history
but presents a particular challenge for
subsequent performers of his work.
Performance, like fashion, is shot through
with the style of the period, and Thomas’s
style was declamatory and grand, in a way
that can sound dated in the 21st century.
His recorded poetry readings were often
closer in style to public performance for an
audience in a hall than for the intimate,
one-on-one situation of an audiobook. Yet
his natural talent and his charisma make his
recordings speak to us across the decades,
giving us a unique insight into the way in
which the poet himself thought of his work.

So actors coming now to his stories,
poetry and broadcast programmes, which
they will undoubtedly have heard and
absorbed, have to put their memories of his
inflections and his personal dramatic view to
one side, in order to let their own
expression sing. This wasn’t the case with
the first BBC recording of Under Milk Wood.
None of the actors who went into that
studio in January 1954 had heard Thomas’s
own performances in New York – so they
could come to it entirely fresh.

Yet the The Essential Dylan Thomas is
designed to celebrate the many facets of
Thomas himself, which is why we have
brought together this unusual programme
featuring great historical recordings as well
as new performances, given by some of the
finest Welsh actors of our time. Actors
speak for their day, and poets for all time. In
the end, we hope that you will find the
conjunction as vivifying to listen to as we
did to prepare.

Under Milk Wood – A Short History

On 25 January 1954, the BBC’s Third
Programme broadcast a new ‘Play for
Voices’ by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas,
who had died suddenly two months earlier
in New York. The work was called Under
Milk Wood, and it was recognised instantly
as something quite out of the ordinary, both
in terms of the drama itself and the
performance.

It presented, in a remarkably vivid,
engagingly elliptical way, a portrait of a
small Welsh town, Llareggub. Here was a
24-hour slice of a community cut through
the strata of small-town life to bring the
listener past the front doors, past the
niceties, into the hearts and minds of the
people themselves. We’re let into their
thoughts, memories and feelings with the
outside world running its own concurrent
existence.

Now, half a century after that first
transmission, it has become a classic of
radio, perhaps the greatest radio play ever –
an unforgettable ‘comedy of humours’, as
the critic Kenneth Tynan called it. It was,
without question, the pinnacle of creativity
in British radio, coming at a time when the
medium had not been marginalised by TV,
when millions still gathered around their
‘wireless’ to listen as a family.

Under Milk Wood casts such a strong
shadow over Dylan Thomas’s work that, in
the 21st century, it is easy to think that it
emerged fully formed in a short space of
time, a moment when writer, performers
and medium met and gelled into a classic
event. But this was not really the case. It
was a very special event, certainly. Everyone
who participated in that recording was
aware that something special was taking
place. It might have been partially fuelled by
the dramatic circumstances: the recent
death of Thomas himself, an unequivocal
feeling that here was a script that was much
more than just an ordinary 90-minute radio
play, and the fact that Richard Burton, the
young classical actor of the moment, lead
an outstanding cast. And there was a highoctane
atmosphere in the studio itself for
many reasons: five days of rehearsal had
been set aside – an unusual length even in
those days – and there was a fair amount of
pre-recording (including children’s voices
from Dylan Thomas’s hometown of
Laugharne); by contrast, Richard Burton
himself was only able to come to the
final rehearsal because of Shakesperean
commitments at the Old Vic; and while at
least it was not a live broadcast –
transmission was the following day – it was
in the early days of tape, and editing
opportunities were fairly minimal.

The sense of anticipation surrounding
the occasion was underlined by the unusual
interest of Harley Usill, far-sighted founder
of the spoken-word record label Argo, who
agreed even before the recording to release
the broadcast as an LP. His judgement was
unerring: it is said to have sold over two
million units – on LP, tape and now CD –
over the years.

Though sudden in its final appearance,
Under Milk Wood was the culmination of a
life’s work for Dylan Thomas. It has been
called the ‘Welsh Ulysses’, and Joyce’s
masterpiece certainly did lay seeds in
Thomas’s mind. As early as 1932, in
conversation with his mentor Bert Trick,
Thomas mused about doing a ‘Welsh
Ulysses’; and there are clearly similarities:
one town, 24 hours, the inner speech
interwoven with exterior world, and the
sense of everyday events as mythical. His
word sense was also shot through with
humour: it was as early as 1932 or 1933
that Thomas first came up with the name of
Llareggub for the town. When Crick was
surprised at such a Welsh word, Thomas
advised him to read it backwards.

And it was as ‘Llareggub’, and later ‘The
Town That Was Mad’, that the concept of
24 hours in a small town survived and
mutated over the following two decades.
Llareggub is in fact the name of a woman
who appears in a stark story called The
Burning Baby that Thomas had written in
the 1930s; but there are many instances of
words, names, phrases and, above all,
atmospheres that first appear in stories,
poems, scripts, letters and conversations
before eventually reaching their final and
finest form in Under Milk Wood.

Throughout the 1940s, Thomas played
with the idea of ‘Llareggub’. Initial sketches
concentrated on painting pictures of the
town and its inhabitants. Then he
considered adding a storyline based on a
Welsh town enclosed by barbed wire and
called ‘The Town That Was Mad’. He had
mentioned that it was to be partially based
on Laugharne, the Welsh sea town that he
had made his home. Thomas even
considered a play in which people of
Laugharne would play themselves. ‘They are
so convinced that they’re absolutely sane
normal people. I think they’d be delighted
to prove this on stage,’ he told his friend,
the writer Richard Hughes.

Parallel to his private life as a writer was
Thomas’s more public life – as a drinker and
carouser, of course, but also as a performer.
He began recording for the BBC in 1937,
though the first broadcast was not
auspicious: he forgot about the recording
and had to be dragged out of a pub to a
studio. He did not record again for nearly
two years. But it was clear that he did have
a natural and distinctive talent for reading
poetry, particularly his own, but also that of
others. Over the next few years his became
an increasingly familiar voice on the
wireless, and it extended beyond poetry as
he began to devise programmes of a
different nature – observations on life and
documentaries of all kinds. Though his
broadcasting work was punctuated by his
active social life, there was no doubting the
charisma that crossed the airways.

Musing about Wales, especially the
Wales of his youth, became quite a
regular occupation. In 1943 he wrote
Reminiscences of Childhood for the BBC
Welsh Service, about Swansea. In 1944 he
wrote and broadcast Quite Early One
Morning, which presents his view of
another Welsh town, New Quay. Here was
the voice of the personal narrator, a
foreshadowing of Under Milk Wood, both
told in Thomas’s idiosyncratic singing style:

Quite early one morning in the winter in Wales,
by the sea that was lying down still after and
green of grass after a night of tar-black howling
and rolling, I went out of the house where I had
come to stay after a cold unseasonal holiday…

The town was not yet awake…

It is in Quite Early One Morning that Mrs
Ogmore-Pritchard first appears, saying:
‘Before you let the sun in, mind he wipes
his shoes,’ one of the unforgettable lines in
Under Milk Wood; also present are
‘bombazine black’ and ‘the big seas of
dreams’, the kind of rich imagery that
epitomises Dylan Thomas, Welsh no matter
how he sounded, redolent of rhythm and
chapel.

The following year, there was another
affectionate look backwards at his
childhood (perhaps more imaginary than
true) in Memories of Christmas, which was
broadcast on BBC Wales’s Children’s Hour.
Shortly after this came The London: ‘a day
in the life of Mrs and Mrs Jackson, Ted and
Lily, of number forty-nine Montrose Street,
Shepherds Bush, London, W12’. This mixed
narration with fantasy, and in form, if
not Welsh content, it was an important
precursor of Under Milk Wood. Thomas’s
biographer Andrew Lycett, in Dylan Thomas:
A New Life, points out that in the same
year, Edward Sackville-West asked, in the
New Statesman ‘why this remarkable poet
had never attempted a poetic drama for
broadcasting’.

With the benefit of hindsight, an
unmistakeable head of steam was gradually
building. In 1947 came Return Journey to
Swansea, which steps even closer to Under
Milk Wood. Here, personal narration and
short character scenes are intermingled
effectively and naturally. It is full of wit –
sometimes against the narrator himself with
his ‘cut-glass accent’ – and poetry, of
course. The character interpolations have
that immediacy which makes the form so
successful in its more famous incarnation.

Return Journey also demonstrated how
an atmospheric, descriptive piece could
stand on its own with the slimmest of plots
or driving storyline. Here, the unifying
thread is a search for a lost time. Thomas
was not to abandon the idea of a plot for
Under Milk Wood for some time, but he
was firmly in control of the medium of radio
broadcasting.

In 1949 he sent a poem, Over St John’s
Hill, to an Italian literary magazine, Botteghe
Oscure. This published work in Italian and
English and was run by Marguerite Caetani,
Princess di Bassiano. It was the first contact
between the two and the poem’s
publication was to result in other
collaborations. In 1952, very short of
money, Thomas sent the first half of a
script entitled Llareggub: A Play for Radio
Perhaps, asking her, desperately, for £100. It
didn’t contain a trace of what he still
thought would be the plot – a town
enclosed by barbed wire – but was just an
evocation of a town and its people. The
storyline would come, he thought.

The script had advanced with the
support and help of the BBC producer
Douglas Cleverdon. Initially, ‘The Town That
Was Mad’, as discussed by Thomas and
Cleverdon in 1950, was to have a storyline
involving a town that was certified mad
under post-war legislation. The
townspeople would have to prove their
sanity in court, cross-examined by blind
Captain Cat. But none of this appeared in
the script sent to Botteghe Oscure.

Cleverdon had already worked with
Dylan Thomas, recording Thomas’s own
poetry and also that of Milton. His role over
the next three years until its first
performance was crucial – teasing out the
script from an increasingly ailing Thomas,
guarding it, and finally bringing it into
brilliant daylight through the original BBC
recording (and a second recording some
years later). Without Cleverdon, it would
probably not have happened. At one point
Cleverdon (a former bookseller in Bristol)
even tried to get the notoriously unreliable
Thomas a job at the BBC, when the poet
was in even greater financial straits than
normal. He asked that Thomas be put on
the payroll for six weeks so that he could
finish Under Milk Wood. When this was
deemed unacceptable, he suggested paying
Thomas five guineas per thousand words (at
this point, a series was being discussed) and
if it were not finished he, Cleverdon, would
cover the payments from his own salary.
Ultimately this was not necessary, but the
commitment shown by Cleverdon was
exceptional.

Equally important in the genesis of
Under Milk Wood were Thomas’s American
contacts. In 1950 Thomas made his first trip
to the USA and became a hit on the poetryreading
circuit. His presence, his reading
manner and his poetry combined to create
an impact in a similar way as happened with
Oscar Wilde 70 years before. One of his
principal champions and supporters was
John Brinnin, a poet himself but also
director of the Poetry Center at the Young
Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew
Association in New York: the YM-YWHA
society. He invited Thomas to read there and
to organise further readings. Brinnin was to
play a much greater role than simply a
facilitator: it was his encouragement in New
York (and sometimes in the UK) combined
with Cleverdon’s efforts in London that
ensured the completion of Under Milk
Wood.

In September 1952 Brinnin met Thomas
in a pub in North London. It was there,
during a discussion about programme
options for another American tour, that
‘Llareggub’ was mentioned. It would
provide, Brinnin suggested, a very different
evening from that of a poetry selection:
how was it going? Thomas said he could
have it nearly ready by March in time for a
performance by May. This would give
American actors a chance to get to grips
with the parts. It was also in this
conversation that Thomas suggested a
different title – ‘Under Milk Wood’ – as
‘Llareggub’ might be a bit obscure for
American audiences. And so it became.

In April 1953 Thomas sailed for New
York. He was met by Elizabeth Reitell,
nominally assistant to Brinnin at the Poetry
Center, but a well-connected and nononsense
New Yorker. It was her job to
make Under Milk Wood happen – which
meant ensuring that it was written and that
a cast was there, rehearsed, to perform it.

Thomas fulfilled various poetry and
lecture engagements in Boston, all the while
working on the script. He gave the first solo
reading of Under Milk Wood in Harvard on
3 May and continued a busy series of
appearances. A week before the scheduled
performance at the Poetry Center he
rehearsed with the cast, making small
changes to the script: Butcher Beynon
chased after ‘squirrels’ rather than ‘corgis’
with his cleaver – changes meant for
America only. He encouraged the actors
with ‘Love the words, love the words’.

He was still travelling constantly, reading
poetry, addressing students and living on
the edge. The day before the first
performance, Thomas was in Boston. He
came back into New York by train on the
morning of Thursday 14 May and arrived in
time for a rehearsal. He then made other
small alterations to the script, working it
into presentable form.

Elizabeth Reitell, in a talk called Portrait
of Dylan Thomas given on the BBC’s Third
Programme in November 1963, recalled:

The curtain was going to rise at 8.40pm. Well, at
8.10 Dylan was locked in the backroom with me.
And no end to Under Milk Wood. He kept saying ‘I
can’t, I simply can’t do this.’ I said, ‘You can, the
curtain is going to go up.’ Strangely enough, he
wrote the very end of Under Milk Wood then and
there, and he wrote the lead-up to it. He would
scribble it down, I would copy it, print it so that the
secretary could read it, hand it to John Brinnin, and
hand it to the secretary, to do six copies. We all
jumped into a cab finally and got over to the theatre
at half-past eight and handed out the six copies to
the actors.

He rushed through an ending – which
became the final ending. At 8.40pm, he
walked onto the stage with five American
actors, and the premiere of Under Milk
Wood was underway. Thomas read the First
Voice, the Reverend Eli Jenkins and other
small parts while the American cast shared
the rest, performing in a mixture of
English and attempts at Welsh – all
with an unmistakeable New York twang.
The spoken-word publishing company
Caedmon, who had already released LPs of
Thomas, was on hand with a single
microphone and an ordinary tape machine
to record the event.

It was a success. It was fresh, inventive
and entertaining. There were 14 curtain
calls and a second reading some days later
at the Poetry Center. By the time Thomas
returned to the UK, news of the success had
preceded him, and his agent David Higham
and Cleverdon were both keen to ensure a
prominent English premiere.

Under Milk Wood was still not finished.
Thomas, back in Laugharne with his family,
continued to work on it while also working
on a BBC programme, the long-term project
of an opera with Igor Stravinsky (whom he
had met in America), and various poems. In
September he was back in London to
prepare for a flight to New York. He visited
Cleverdon on 15 September carrying the
handwritten manuscript of Under Milk
Wood. Cleverdon immediately set a
secretary to type it out, returning it to the
author afterwards. The following day,
Thomas rang Cleverdon in a panic, saying
that he had lost the manuscript somewhere.
Fortunately, Cleverdon was able to say that
he could provide a copy for him to take to
New York. Some days later, after Thomas
had already left, Cleverdon tracked down
the manuscript in a Soho pub.

Thomas took part in two further
performances of Under Milk Wood at
Kaufmann Auditorium sponsored by the
Poetry Center on 24 and 25 October. Again,
he made certain small changes to the text
to accommodate American speech (‘gypsies’
were substituted for ‘gyppos’) and shortly
after he celebrated his 39th birthday, on
27 October. Engagements, parties and a lot
of drinking followed – and he fell ill. On
5 November he lapsed into a coma and he
died in hospital on 9 November.

Plans for the BBC recording of Under
Milk Wood had already been made. Under
Milk Wood: A Play for Voices had been
through many guises in the 20 years since
the first germ of an idea mentioned to Bert
Trick, but for much of that time it was seen
as a play for radio. Radio was such a
prominent part of Thomas’s life – not least
as a source of income – that he repeatedly
emphasised the medium for which it was
designed.

He sold early drafts to Botteghe Oscure,
at his death he was working on an
abridged form for the American magazine
Mademoiselle, and on his return from the
first performance in the Poetry Center his
agent and the publishers Dent discussed
bringing it out in book form.

Meanwhile, Cleverdon was assiduously
and determinedly ensuring that it would be
heard on radio. The death of Thomas did
not deter him. The BBC could draw on
experienced radio voices from BBC Wales
for the character parts. Daniel Jones, the
Welsh composer, close friend of Thomas
and his literary trustee, was commissioned
to prepare the music and children from
Laugharne to sing the songs in pre-recorded
sessions.

In his authoritative book on Under Milk
Wood – The Growth of Milk Wood –
Cleverdon says unequivocally: ‘Had Dylan
lived he would have taken the part of the
First Voice in the broadcast productions.’
The favourite to take his place was Richard
Burton, the young Welsh star (fortunately in
London where Under Milk Wood was to be
recorded) in the Old Vic’s Shakespeare
season. Cleverdon finalised the script,
incorporating some of the changes made by
Thomas in New York, and sent it to the
Director General of the BBC for censorship
clearance. It was deemed fit to record in its
entirety though in the end a few words
were cut.

The music was recorded on 15 and
16 January at Laugharne School. The
introduction of tape some years before
enabled these children’s songs to be prerecorded
and mixed in later – but most of
the sound effects were done live in the
studio at the time of the recording.

Five days of rehearsals were scheduled –
an unusually long period even for those
relaxed days – from Wednesday 20 January
to Sunday 24 January. Burton was playing
Hamlet at night and rehearsing Coriolanus
during the day so he hadn’t time to attend
rehearsals. In his book Cleverdon says that
he pre-recorded Burton reading the
narration and used this recording during
rehearsals; but Richard Bebb, who read
Second Voice, denies this (see Richard
Bebb’s account). Perhaps Cleverdon
confused this recording with the 1963
version that he made subsequently.
However, Burton did join the cast on
Sunday morning for the final rehearsal, and
the recording in the afternoon. It was clearly
a hugely creative time, but also fraught.
Daniel Jones, as literary trustee, refused to
allow a few extra speeches, written by
Thomas in New York, to be incorporated in
the BBC performance, despite pleas by
Cleverdon. They have since been reinstated
in the ‘definitive’ edition of the play.

The other major difference between the
BBC broadcast version and the ‘definitive’
edition is the use of First Voice and Second
Voice. Thomas clearly split the part of the
narrator between two actors for the BBC
version that he handed to Cleverdon before
travelling to New York. According to Bebb,
this was not for any textual or dramatic
reason, but because it was part of an
unspoken tradition within BBC Radio to try
to employ as many actors as possible. In all
the performances given by Thomas himself,
and in subsequent recordings, and in
virtually all performances, there has always
been only one narrator.

The cast was a mixture of professional
and semi-professional, even amateur, actors.
At the heart was a core of professional
actors, most of whom were highly
experienced in the special art of radio
performance. Richard Burton was already
the leading young actor of his day. Nurtured
by his adopted father Philip Burton (a school
teacher turned radio producer and
occasional actor), Richard had been a child
actor and, despite being relatively young at
this stage, knew the ins and outs of a radio
studio like an old professional. It was this
that enabled him to feel relatively confident
in stepping in to do First Voice with virtually
no rehearsal. He found it a tougher task
than he had imagined, but was able to
draw on his radio experience and natural
talent to produce one of the most
charismatic performances in radio history.
Another especially vivid performance came
from Hugh Griffith, an established figure
who effectively used his gravely voice to
create a unsurpassable blind Captain Cat.

Bebb, another young Welsh actor, had
just joined the BBC Radio Rep. – that
changing group of actors who expect to be
called in at any moment to read a letter, a
quote, play Romeo or a part in a modern
drama. Versatility, quick thinking, natural
talent and an awareness of the microphone
as a friend are the requisites for a job with
the BBC Radio Rep., which still exists. He
read the part of Second Voice.

Gwenyth Petty was a young actress
based in BBC Wales, and, with many of her
colleagues, came up to London to take part
in this production.

I was in Cardiff when I remember being told that
there was a production being planned for the
Third Programme. It would mean a week in
London. I was pleased because my boyfriend was
a medical student at St Thomas’s. There was a lot
of traffic between the BBC Rep. in Wales and
London. I went into Studio 2 and there was
Douglas Cleverdon with the script spread out on
the grand piano. We had no idea the impact that
work would have.

Petty read for Cleverdon and was invited
to London to join the cast of Under Milk
Wood, playing Lily Smalls and Mrs Dai Bread
One. In that first BBC recording also was
Sybil Williams, Burton’s wife, a gifted actress
in her own right – she played Myfanwy
Price.

The BBC recording used a varied cast
to create a rich soundscape of a Welsh
fishing village. There were experienced
professionals, such as Hugh Griffith who
played Captain Cat, and Rachel Roberts.
Many of the other actors were, strictly
speaking, amateurs in that they earned their
living in other ways. One example was the
aforementioned Philip Burton, who recited
the poetry of the Reverend Eli Jenkins
with aplomb. These semi-professionals or
amateurs appeared regularly on BBC Wales
and knew how to create and project distinct
characters.

All these different strands came together
to make a legendary recording. From its first
broadcast on 25 January 1954 it was
acknowledged as something extraordinary
and it established Under Milk Wood as a
classic, to be repeated many times a year for
many years. Though it may have found its
perfect milieu, it wasn’t long before stage
versions appeared. Cleverdon was involved
in the first UK stage production which
opened at the Theatre Royal, Newcastleupon-
Tyne on 13 August 1956 and then
travelled to the Edinburgh Festival. The parts
of First Voice and Second Voice were
brought together and played by Donald
Houston. The production reached London in
September and played for seven months.
Cleverdon then directed the first US stage
production which opened on Broadway at
the Henry Miller Theatre on 15 October
1956.

In 1963, Cleverdon made a second
recording of the play for the BBC. The
intention was to present a ‘full version’
reinstating speeches which Jones had
refused to allow in 1954. Once again,
Cleverdon turned to Richard Burton as the
single narrator. Some of the original cast
came back, but sometimes in different
parts. Hugh Griffith was Captain Cat again;
Gwenyth Petty played Rosie Probert and
reprised Lily Smalls; Rachel Thomas (wife of
Rex Harrison) who had played Rosie Probert
earlier switched to Mrs Pugh and reprised
Mrs Willy Nilly. But while it may have been
textually more correct, and had improved
technical standards, this second BBC
recording couldn’t match the spirit and
magic of that first recording.

Burton later made a video recording of
Under Milk Wood. Anthony Hopkins and a
carefully chosen cast, produced by George
Martin, then made a brave attempt at
putting a different, modern spin on it for
another commercial recording in the 1980s.

However, despite certain raw moments,
audible edits, and sonic limitations of the
period, the original 1954 recording remains
by far the one to hear. It is one of those rare
occasions when the greatness of the work is
matched, not just served, by the greatness
of the performance – and fortunately,
the BBC microphones were on hand to
record it.

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